Quotes About Respectability

In the 1790s, more than a century before the invention of modern dating culture, an underground sexual economy flourished on a scale almost unimaginable today. Men, whether they were married or not, enjoyed wide sexual latitude: they could often pursue an active sexual double life without incident. Women, on the other hand, faced a stark contrast between sexual respectability and social ruin.

men paid one group of women to provide the services that their respectable counterparts would not.

I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace.

where the more distant phrasing can lend a veneer of respectability to the otherwise prurient-seeming habit of a naturalist spying on other creatures' intimate lives).

I can reason down or deny everything, except this perpetual Belly: feed he must and will, and I cannot make him respectable.

For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

Unless we professors change our ways and stop seeking respectability and institutional standing at the expense of genuine human impact, we are destined, as Tennyson has it, to rust unburnished, never to shine in use.

He said he was concerned about what could still happen to me. I could still be vilified and seen as dangerous, therefore losing me the last remaining bit of respectability I have with the Christian world. I said that after everything I'd been through for the sake of integrity, how could I allow fears like that to control me?

the house had been set up by two countesses 'by divine inspiration, as it is piously believed', to preserve the respectability of women who couldn't marry, couldn't afford the 'dowry' needed to enter a convent and who were about 'to go begging or shamefully support themselves'. The beguinage allowed them to 'support and clothe themselves by suitable work, without shaming themselves or their friends'.

His departure would return the Trump organization to pure family control—the family and its functionaries, without an internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family's point of view, it would also—at least in theory—help facilitate one of the most implausible brand shifts in history: Donald Trump to respectability.

Seeing themselves as hardworking and self-reliant, the upwardly mobile sons of white trash parents believed, as Smith put it, that "he is responsible for himself and himself alone." The same self-made man who looked down on white trash others had conveniently chosen to forget that his own parents escaped the tar-paper shack only with the help of the federal government. But now that he had been lifted to respectability, he would pull up the social ladder behind him.

W]e would do better to treat terrorists as common criminals, people who have broken the laws recognized by all civil societies. To treat them as soldiers is to increase their power, respectability, and commitment.

Some people always look respectable, I thought, and some people never do. Give Doll a bath, a haircut, a shave, a manicure, dress him in a thousand-pound suit, and he'd still look unwashed and somehow unsavoury. You couldn't clean off his past.

he wanted so much, but asked for nothing. Just pretended he was respectable. Pretended as if he was never gripped by animalistic savagery

In the 1960's, Labour had gained some power, or at least respectability. Spokesmen for the working class - but of course not necessarily coming from that class or belonging there except through ideology - were upset by the exposed inequalities and abuses disguised as treatment. It did not exactly strengthen the credibility of these measures that most receivers of this type of treatment for crime turned out to belong to just those classes supposed to be in political power.

Historic priority, could it be proved, would be vital evidence in a suit of contested ownership; and earlier in this century, before ethnic considerations were the overriding factors they have since become, it was more important still: possession by conquest, backed by historical continuity and stiffened by treaties, was still a valid and respectable consideration.